Punitive law should be the issue, not criticism of it
First Amendment protects my anti-Blue Lives tweet, Journal wrong to call for my removal
Given that the First Amendment is the lifeblood of newspapers, one would hope the Albuquerque Journal might understand it better than to call on the city of Albuquerque to flatly violate it by removing a member of a board over constitutionally protected speech. It appears the Journal just doesn’t get it.
For enlightenment, I’d like to invite the Journal to read the seminal and highly applicable First Amendment case Pickering v. Board of Education.
In the meantime, allow me to supply an elementary primer on the First Amendment which, to be fair, is commonly misunderstood. Usually, it is misunderstood by the general public and not newspapers — yet, somehow, here we are.
The First Amendment is not a mere codification of the freedom-first attitude that individuals be allowed to say whatever they want without consequence. Rather, the First Amendment precludes governmental actors, like the City Council, from abridging speech. This means that the government may not prohibit or punish speech and, thus, that the city cannot remove me over a tweet. Enshrined within this rule is the principle that political speech — such as commentary on legislation — is sacrosanct.
At issue is my retweet of a news analysis of “Blue Lives Matter” legislation that seeks to make assault of an officer a federal crime, to which I commented: F— THIS. The Journal asserts I thereby “suggest” “blue lives” “don’t matter.” Flaccidly, it charges this fallacious assertion indicates I hold a bias against law enforcement. Neither is true. Adding insult, the Journal unfairly invokes the death of an officer, my friend Daniel Webster, who was killed on duty, to inspire outrage. Trotting out Daniel Webster’s death as a political sword with which to stab his colleague in a smear piece exists on a plane of indecency that I care not to personally know. Yet, somehow, here we are. I offer no apology for my words. Blue Lives Matter is not a true cause; it is anti-Black Lives Matter sloganeering that serves only to detract from the latter’s success in bringing the disproportionate use of lethal force against black bodies to the forefront of the national conversation.
That officers’ lives have value and deserve protection has never been in dispute. In every state, assaults against officers already carry higher penalties than the same assaults against non-officers, making this bill legally redundant.
The concern over the language I employed is tone-policing, and I will not be polite in criticizing ideas that aim to steal the focus away from those lives that hang in the balance of our semantics.
Further, there is no evidence of a trending increase in violence against officers that justifies further aggravating criminal penalties that are already sufficiently punitive.
The Journal cites a 2018 USA Today story, pointing out 144 officers died on duty last year, an increase from 2017. However, they fail to inform that officer deaths were actually at a 50-year low in 2017. They fail to provide context: 92 of those 144 deaths were attributable to accident or illness. They fail to inform that officer deaths are back down this year, per the FBI. They fail to inform that the real long-term trend in officer deaths is downward over decades.
None of this, however, has anything to do with police oversight or the requirement of mature decision-making.
Had any of my actual decision-making been “immature,” the union would have centered that in their call from removal. The fact the union cannot find, within the hundreds of case reviews I have been party to, any “immature” or partial adjudications, demonstrates easily that their claims of bias are baseless.
Relevantly, I am opposed to all proposed criminal penalty enhancements. Criminal enhancements contribute to a culture of mass incarceration, overpunishing crime while failing to deter it. What I dislike is bad legislation. The Journal missed the point of my remark entirely.